When a magistrate sentenced the literary genius to two years of hard labor for the crime of being gay, he said it was the maximum punishment allowed by law. That turned out to be truer than the judge might have imagined. It killed him.

The admonition not to “get on our high horse” about jihadist terror as a “unique” phenomenon rings hollow, coming from a leader who routinely sends missile-firing drones to blow suspected militants to bits.

With the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the use of torture by the CIA after 9/11, the final defense of the indefensible by its perpetrators, advocates and publicists is falling apart before our eyes.

In a new biography of the French girl freedom-fighter, it isn’t the maid of Orleans who receives the blazing light of scrutiny so much as the society that engulfed her and the literary imagination in which she endures.

“Don’t make history a mystery” read one of the signs at a rally in Jefferson County, Colo. High-school students in this suburban district, referred to locally as “JeffCo,” have been walking out of class en masse this past week, protesting the planned censorship of the district’s Advanced Placement (AP) United States history curriculum by the local school board.

When he announced his leave-taking last week, Attorney General Eric Holder spoke of Robert F. Kennedy as his inspiration for believing that the Justice Department “can and must always be a force for that which is right.”

The trend-chasing retailer has apologized for selling a “vintage” Kent State sweatshirt, but insists the red splotches that look remarkably like bloodstains were not meant to allude to the 1970 national guard shooting.

There was a moment in the last quarter-century when the Congress of the United States made the nation proud. It did so across all its usual lines of division: Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal, hawk and dove.

Once an emancipatory project predicated on the right to study and engage the past critically, history under the reign of neoliberalism has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the greatest generation.

“Unjust laws exist.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The naturalist and pacifist asked, “Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

Destroying, degrading or containing the Islamic State—whichever goal President Obama chooses—will be the easy part. Finding ways for fundamentalist Islam to express itself peacefully is a bigger, tougher and more important project.

One of film’s most beloved actors and directors died Sunday after 90 years of life and a career that somehow made giants of the 20th century (including Mahatma Gandhi, as played by Ben Kingsley, above) seem even grander.

Four miles south of the Ferguson protest’s ground zero, along the same street, in the quietude of Calvary Cemetery, lies Dred Scott, the man born a slave who famously fought for his freedom in the courts.